Brake Bias

[SamDale]

I took these photos during V8 Supercar race three at Indy on the weekend. All the photos were taken at the same place - 120m (plus or minus a few metres) from turn 5 (Bartercard chicane), and on the same lap (2 laps before the safety car came out - about lap 16, I think).

Interesting to see the difference in setup between three top guys.







Clearly Murphy runs a LOT more rear brake bias than everyone else (I have more photos of more cars, and Lowndes and Ambrose are the next brightest, compared to Murphy).

[XW GT]

Speed differential?

[storyline]

Not necessarily - you would need to look at each lap the image was taken to see how they compared on tha particular lap. Also fuel load would have a huge impact on them.

When Hidden Valley put one of the speed trap time lines in they used HRT's data to install it 20 metres before their braking point on the main straight. That was all well and good - except, as it turned out, they were braking later than anyone else so the speed trap ended up being just AFTER nearlt 75% of the field were actually braking.

[retro]

Murphy is a left foot braker so he could have his left foot dragging the pedal.

Some drivers like more bias on the rear to *set* the car as they go into a corner.

Lowndes is a good example of more rear bias.

[rdmdog]

Different pad and rotor material, and differing brake cooling ducts can make it look a fair whack different too!!

[Mattracer]

Interesting. And great pics. Like the LF brake theory and the bias thing with Lowndes. Would look great at night!

[SamDale]

Also interesting was to watch these guys (plus a few others - pretty much the guys that made up the top 5 or 6 laptime-wise) coming out of the corners - a good example was the same corner (Bartercard chicane), these guys were shifting into the next gear around 5 metres earlier than pretty much the rest of the field.

In anything other than a controlled-ratio class it's obviously impossible to make any sort of comparison based on where the car changes gear, but these guys with their fixed ratio-set and diff ratio, the difference is quite obvious. Although without access to data (or maybe a radar gun), difficult to say if it's because they're carrying a couple of km/h more through the corner or if they're putting the power down better, or both, but it was clear that the fastest guys were reaching the same speed sooner than everybody else.

Exactly the same thing with the Carrera Cup - the top 3 guys were bumping the rev-limiter and shifting into the next gear about 5 metres earlier than the rest.